I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse(ryansouthgate.com) |
I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse(ryansouthgate.com) |
Ads don't just show things, they forward you to websites that vibrate your phone and claim you won prizes on ebay, amazon, or apple.
Those ads and scripts are on completely legitimate newspapers, ebay, etc.
It's like those companies never use their own product or actually pay attention to what's happening.
The internet without adblockers is largely unusable and dangerous.
I made Bluniversal Comments partly for this, but there are other Bluesky-based solutions out there if you prefer.
On one hand there is the impact on web sites which will lose more traffic but on the other hand this will kill the trash ad networks (maybe good in many senses but problematic from antitrust perspective) and also also a lot of trash sites that dominate search results. No more fandom, no more Forbes. The trouble is that the web accessible from Google has been so bad for so long that people aren't going to miss it.
For instance I've been playing the game Arknights where there is a pool of 366 'operators' of which every player has a subset so it is difficult to give a walkthrough that works for everyone and you often have questions like 'Should I use resources to upgrade operator A, B, C or D?' and AI Mode gives me a good explanation of the tradeoffs -- the alternative is Fandom sites which have endless incomprehensible tables or spending hours surfing Reddit where half of the opinions are off the wall, complete garbage ads are blended seamlessly into the content and god forbid I accidentally hit the mouse button anywhere because I get navigated somewhere completely random which might be NSFW.
Similarly I was helping my son look for a rackmount MIDI synth and you could spend hours watching people drone on about it on YouTube or looking at Ebay listings or other sources or you could get some good choices that are well explained and have some links.
The "dead internet" is finally going to die.
I would totally agree that this makes your site look like an armpit of the internet, but also - there was a way to figure out that this would happen ahead of time. Google Ads last I checked weren't nearly as bad, but even these were prone to scams and malvertising campaigns on sites I've frequented.
Writing a comment that categorizes comments as a literary genre and then immediately argues that comments are useless is some meta level deconstruction. Kudos.
Comment systems are useful/effective when someone is paying the full cost of moderation.
Posts could show both under the article (like "normal" comments) and for aggregated discussion on Bluesky / any other app that renders Bluesky posts.
And you'd get "free" moderation (at least for basic stuff) from the Bluesky mod team.
I was inspired by that and wrote up my experience integrating with my Hugo based blog here: https://brojonat.com/posts/bluesky-hugo-comments/
But, the solution I've been looking for/prototyping is one that lets people comment from the Fadiverse, so it will also double as a feed. Nothing to show yet, but one-day maybe.
They could be turned off at the time but only on a case-by-case basis. In the end, I got rid of Disqus.
Does anyone have advice for handling blog subscriptions? I'm thinking of switching to Kit, which has a free tier that seems reasonable. Paid services seem to start at $50/month, which is way more than I want to spend. (Originally, Blogger handled subscriptions automatically, but Google removed that feature.)
Example:https://dalevross.rosssquared.org/blog/2013/08/16/pi-lovin.h...
If anyone is able to confirm that they're not seeing ads either, I would be grateful.
The barrier to entry is a feature and not a bug.
They are not suitable for one-off comments on a blog post. In particular, I'm not even sure how you could make it possible for a normal user using a standard mail client to reply to a comment that was posted before they came across the blog post.
One alternative I've come across while researching this was https://cusdis.com/ - has anyone tried this?
Also the project does not seem active.
https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/26-meh_another_comme...
Having written my own multiple times and used several others before disqus I’m unlikely to switch unless the new thing is super compelling and I believe it will stick around.
Spam is hard to deal with. Akismet fails miserably for me. disqus has the fact they can track users across sites. Spam one site and you’re off all sites.
https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...
Which means complete control of all your github account.
We need to ruthlessly audit third party deps for privacy, perf, spam etc.
There is FOSS option built on nostr you could explore called nocomment. https://github.com/fiatjaf/nocomment.
License is public domain.
You probably mean a PHP that can be hosted for cheap. But then, you end up with a Wordpress nightmare, even more spam and security issues.
I had a pretty popular blog and some posts gathered hundreds of useful comments. But I was so tired of fighting spam that I threw it all away and started using Hugo too, without comments.
It is now 2025, Unless it is an extremely popular site where every blog post has hundreds of comments. For most blogs hosting your own comment section shouldn't even be a rounding error or expensive. Why do we still have to put up with Disqus?
Blog like Michael Tsai [1] do it just fine. You submit a comment it render the page on server.
[1]https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/29/ios-26-0-1-and-ipados-26-...
Online "targeted" ads eliminated the gatekeeper in favour of a free-for-all where shady companies are encouraged to hide their identities so they can simply advertise under a different name when their ad account eventually gets banned. 20 years ago I was seeing scam ads for "mail order brides", "free iPods" and "legal buds", today its crypto scams , political spam and misinformation.
No lock-in, except for GitHub, I suppose.
Maybe anonymous commenting by just solving some captcha is impossible nowadays because in practice all captchas get broken by spam bots immediately. Or maybe not. I would like to see evidence for that first before giving up and choosing a commenting solution which strictly requires an account.
Or just leave it. Nobody needs to comment on blog posts, really. :D
Ironically, if you look at the screenshot, just below the comments' section, you will read: 'Subscribe', 'Privacy' and 'Do Not Sell My Data'. Seriously?! You are already torturing my visitors by throwing many ads, at the same time, on their faces. How can I trust you?
Also, what drives me cra*y the most about online Ads is that they are random and have no relation with the content of the page I am looking at. Oftentimes, they went extremely far by showing what I consider near explicit content.
Utterance.es is GitHub issues backed comments, which is an inherent barrier to commenting, but YMMV if that's an actual problem (generally the value of unbarred comment sections is abysmal). Like remark42, it's open source, but you're relying on a third party's servers.
[0]: https://github.com/umputun/remark42
[1]: https://utteranc.es/
Perhaps there should be an open source alternative. Why isn’t there one by now?
You also get no control over the level of abuse, misinformation, and spam on those external sites.
The joy of having comments on your own site is that you can moderate the bad-faith discussions and curate a friendly / helpful atmosphere.
Yes, you need a small database to receive and serve comments. Spam is mostly taken care of with a hidden field. It is great to build a community of commenters who want to offer their thoughts.
You'll also notice that I use WebMentions to import those 3rd party discussions (or links to them) into my blog.
That way users aren't subject to the advertising on platform A, the poor moderation on platform B, or the difficulty of even finding the comments on platform C.
It is revolting how riddled the default web view is with advertisement and that the only way to browse sanely, you must install an adblocker.
We need a better model of financially supporting websites and services, not all companies are simply greedy, there are bills to pay, but it's gotten ridiculous.
Yes. I think Disqus is trying to get money from the long tail of blogs that enabled Disqus in the past and never bothered to look up for the policy changes. I am sure they started with small, non-invasive ads and eventually got bigger until we get in the situation that we are today.
So even if someone enabled Disqus in the past because they seemed a reasonable system a few years ago, their blogs are now an ad farm and the original owner may have zero idea since it is a blog they abandoned years ago. Heck, my old Wordpress blog that I don't even remember the password is probably an ad field nowadays that is probably generating pennies for one of those companies.
I liked the comments, they were infrequent and OK, but I'm not going to add an alternative, maybe in the future when I feel like it.
Either pay the money they ask if it's worth having comments, or build your own system.
I became “blind” to what the web is really like for most users. I’ve tried to keep this blog minimalist - a clean place to find answers. Those ads not only ruin that experience; they trample privacy too
If you have any recommendations for alternative commenting systems (especially those that respect privacy or are self-hosted), I’d love to hear them!
In the 2010s if you left a wordpress blog unattended even with the official default filter plugin it would fill with spam comments. I dont know if thats still a problem.
When I forget to sign in to YouTube, I see the same pattern, shitty ads that are clearly only allowed because otherwise YouTube wouldn't have sufficient ad inventory to meet their internal KPIs.
Meanwhile when I watch YouTube I get a stream of: "5G blocking beanies", highly questionable medical products, gross out ads about poo and etc ...
It really degrades my view of YouTube / Google.
Who buys pillows because of email spam and YouTube ads? I don't get it. It's probably not a scam, but a very obnoxious company nonetheless.
Some people are going to buy those pillows based on those ads. Others are going to think the ads are stupid but will remember the brand and are now more likely to choose it if they see it in a store. Ads persist because overall they work.
I'm not fully sure about this, an ad network which does that very reliably can probably charge the ad provisioning companies extra due to it being on more high quality sides/locations and pay out extra little due to having "high quality low disturbing" ads.
But with the Google being a quasi monopoly for ad networks on any open platform and most people either blocking all adds or no adds there is just little room for alternatives. I do use uBlock Origin for some custom filters, but I which instead of "on" / "of" there where "on but more like privacy badger" / "on full" / "off" with the first being the default so that users can create an insensitive for better ad handling.
Costco has an entire section of affiliate links to manufacturers they have worked with. The people who go there get special discounts on the products purchased from those manufacturers, and the only ads you get about it are on Costco's site reminding you that this section exists.
Websites could easily add a "shop" page to their sites and screen and curate a selection of companies willing to pay an affiliate link bonus to the site when users purchase through those links.
This would help them generate income while also not enshittifying the site or experience for users.
The reality is, of course, that Google and its ilk doesn't give a single rat's ass about people falling from scams or getting infected by malware. Scams and malware pays better than "ethical" ads (to the degree that such a thing exists). It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
Medical supplements or plans that make claims that clearly aren’t real, financial scams (crypto or get-rich-quick schemes), or product scams (this new device that ‘they’ don’t want you to know about can heat/cool your house in minutes for pennies!).
I’m pretty sure none of this is legal, and Google obviously doesn’t care.
FWIW I have ad personalization off - perhaps it’s a bit better for those who don’t?
I'm happy to pay for media, news, social networks etc. I don't purchase things based on anything other than personal recommendations and research. I have no use for advertising, and I have no desire or need for ad-supported platforms. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. People say advertising works, and that justifies it. The thing is, advertising only works on enough people to justify it. Everyone else hates it with a passion, or studiously avoids it. I'm not sure if we're a majority or a minority, it doesn't matter, but we suffer advertising and wish it were gone.
Advertising needs to change. It would be nice if it just went away, but realistically that's not going to happen. It needs to be recognised as harmful and regulated as a harmful product.
I remember listening to an episode of Better Offline a buddy sent me and anyone who knows about Ed knows that basically half his crusade is against bad AI implementation/“slop”/etc. He’s broadly against the current LLM rush.
First ad when I fired up the podcast episode was yet aother injected ad for yet another AI agent company as generic as the rest. Literally the organizations he’s railing against and calling wasteful. It was clearly because he handed off the advertising to one of these injection services.
Sidebar: these ads tend to perform terribly. Actual ad reads by the host(s) are the only thing that lead to meaningful conversions in podcasts.
Hmm. How are these people not part of the industry exactly?
First I've ever heard this, and I have been working in marketing all my life.
What exactly do you mean by this? Where have you heard it?
As the site is focused on a single topic, I almost always tag a related Lemmy community in the Mastodon post, so it gets comments from there too. Federation is cool.
Then I built an alternative using free Cloudflare Worker
https://github.com/est/req4cmt
It's a simple service that transform comment POST form data to JSON, append to a .jsonl file, then do a `git push`
It renders comments by `git fetch` from a .jsonl file from a remote repo, or simply via raw.githubusercontent.com if your repo was hosted by Github.
The advantange over Github issue/discussion based comment plugins:
1. All data is stored a .git
2. no login of any sort
Github OAuth login might leak all your repo data along with your `access_token` to the plugin provider.
The `git push` works for any remote. You can choose github/gitlab or whatever.
It is estimated that between 30% and 50% of Internet users run ad blockers. I haven't see a single ad in years.
Besides, Pi-holes are kind of overrated. First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply more effective. Second, Pi-hole is kind of heavy for what it does; you can accomplish the same by loading a blacklist directly to the config file of Unbound/Bind/Dnsmasq.
If you are coming to a blog post of mine that has been shared to you, my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section. I am aiding you by not even putting a comment section there.
I realize there is a slim chance for there to be enlightening conversation in a blog comment section - but that is not what my blog is for. You are better served doing that here on HN or a more dedicated forum. Here it can be be more visible for others, for people who want to read discourse.
Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/ZOBUNBg.png
The size of it, above the comments (and under as well of course). That is madness.
I'll have to check some of the alternative listed in here. I could just code it but I really don't want to deal with spam and moderation... Or maybe I'll remove comments altogether.
Still a cool comments product and I still use it on my blog.
Still, since we do not get that many comments these days, I’ll probably postpone it and just provide a static render of existing / historical comments which does have value for archival and discussion purposes.
It dumps all pages and articles as markdown with most Wordpress metadata as front matter metadata, and all comments in a separate yaml file which can be processed as needed. It creates a minimal theme with the necessary templates to do a basic static render of the content. It does need some theme and template tweaking to match Wordpress url structure and ensure all pages end up in the same url/permalink.
I also used a Wordpress hugo exporter plug-in about 3 years ago - worked mostly the same.
Using Hugo still allows me to more easily add content to the site while maintaining a consistent templating and design.
I also experimented with doing a simple static dump of html as generated by Wordpress - I tried two ways, using wget —-mirror which kinda worked but generated a lot of redundant pages, and a Wordpress plugin called “simply static” which was supposed to do something similar but in the end didn’t work.
In the end I decided against the static dump because it would have entirely “frozen” the site in time - I did want the ability to add content down the line; or change the design without having to modify the content significantly. Archiving sites verbatim is best left to the experts at archive.org :)
I’ve also found HN to be a great commenting platform too.
¹ https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
² https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/
³ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
https://kau.sh/blog/bluesky-comments-for-hugo/
I like my implementation cause it blends really well with the blog making it looks almost native.
transferring the burden of maintenance - curation to a social media platform (and a slightly more open one to boot) has been a complete win.
https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
have been pleasant.
If I where to ditch it to save the money, I'd look into integrating Mastodon into the page, I saw somewhere that they used Mastodon as their comment system (it's basically a thread on Mastodon that is embedded in the blog page).
Why not keep the original title? Rhetorical question.
What would be more useful would be an automated list of places where the post has been discussed (and maybe pull the top comments from there through API?)
Social media ruined that. Everyone is now on their own soap box posting comments of drivel from their sub-optimal self-conscious parroting asinine talking points about how one characterized group of statistics ruined it for everyone else. Bots, drivel, linkbacks, social media, stupid laws, and an aversion to independence - we have what we have today. Large platforms that trick humans into use because they have the largest arenas.
Also, the author’s experience with seeing scammy ads on their site doesn’t mean that others are seeing the same ads. Because they ran ad-free for so long it’s possible their token in the AdTech ecosystem is stale in which case it hasn’t put it into any buckets yet. Ergo, you get the smoking/drinking/scamming/doesn’t fit category.
A “token” is a device or ident signature used to identify a viewer or user so that they can tabulate impressions, build personas, categorize your shopping habits, track the sites you visit, link your token with others in your proximity
Well, so they may see worse ads.
Partially agree, partially disagree. Blog comments were already dead when SEO fraudsters discovered that "linkbacks" could be abused for spam even easier than comments were.
That grants people an easy way to discuss content and to check any prior discussion, if any.
Something like https://lists.sr.ht/~shugyousha/public-inbox for example.
For small websites a good start is to get comments by email, publishing only the ones that adds value to the article or conversation. Why? Because we have lots of noise done by social media. A way of curating the comments increase the quality of the website.
If the website gets traction, than it's good to consider a tool to facilitate the commenting and moderation.
Bravo for this banger of a new word.
Here is another one https://docs.coralproject.net/
But that's a temporary solution.
Sure, I can code an in house comment system within an hour, but the real work is to combat spam. Because people (and now also disqus) suck.
I'm not sure it's worth the upkeep to have comments. Seems that mostly spammers comment, and rarely real people. I just wanted a low-maintenance commenting system and Commento seemed to work decently at the time. I'm now noticing it's showing some CORS error, so I guess comments have been broken on my site for some time, doh...
> showing some CORS error
In my case, I found it annoying when cookies gradually stopped working, and eventually I had to make the software use custom HTTP headers instead of cookies.
> Seems that mostly spammers comment
The more interesting the contents of the blog is, the more real humans will like it and post comments? (if they can find it)
But a "Our company posts something each day, even if nothing has happened" blog, or AI fluff, attracts only spammers?
Instead, I went with a tight solution that minimized 3rd party interaction: GitHub Discussions leveraged using the Giscus app (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...). You have to have a GitHub account to post comments using this method, which I like because my blog is geared to those that would have that.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
This is more or less artifact of HN algorithm, it's common to get single digit votes for majority of your posts. Whether something blows up feel almost random, you have to get pretty lucky to hit a time window when there's not that many posts or a lot of people look at new page and upvote the post at the same time to make it snowball. Many links are posted multiple times with no traction and then they suddenly blow up on 4th attempt.
In blogs people can come along anytime and use comments to add additional information/context/perspectives, point out misunderstandings or outdated information, share updates, pose questions and start interesting conversations that do not have an expiration date on them.
The discussion for the article can be found on the same webpage by readers, they don't have to go looking on external sites, most of which have terrible searchability and now require logins just to view content and can delete threads and valuable discussions arbitrarily.
I just realised while writing this comment how much I miss web comment culture from the 00s.
You now have a direct way for users to insert data into your repo, which can include illegal things. And if you're required to delete it later, you'll be forced to edit your git history.
But if everyone behaves, it's a great solution
Yes, and spam is also a huge concern.
I plan to mitigate by adding "Pull Request" style moderation next.
And you can switch to a private repo
For mass moderation, just git clone, grep the lines, sed them out, and `git push -f`
Remember the use case is for static generated personal blogs.
I'd argue it's even quicker than, say a paginated bloated megabytes javascript rendered single-page application moderation system.
In case of comments you don't like, just delete the line and `git commit`
to erase the history entirely, use `git cherry-pick` and `git push -f`
It might be a nightmare for people not familiar with `git`, but for folks running a static blog like Hugo, they use lots of shell commands anyway.
They certainly do, but for they same reason why people chose static site generators like Hugo over Wordpress, I'd like complete control of full data.
The good value of static-hosted comments is that you `git clone` for backup and `git push` for redudency.
I also dislike managing DBs. Think of all those mess with backups, migrations, imports, exports, difference between mysql/pg/sqlite/d1. Tons of operating cost just for the sake of few blog comments
It's just a bunch of .jsonl files, the last resort is direct inline those .jsonl into .html files when generating
isn't that better IF the commenter has a GH account? (if you're writing a personal tech blog, then it's not a problem, your readers are Github users already)
Github issue or discussion based plugins require OAuth
If you look closely, some OAuth scope requires "Act on your behalf". Others require "repo" scope which means read your private data.
But for my use case, I like having the Pihole UI to see the charts and it's nice for temporarily unblocking one domain, etc.
Here is an excellent alternative to running Pihole that I've used before: https://www.geoghegan.ca/unbound-adblock.html
Damn. I played around with PiHole years ago on an original Raspberry Pi Model B, and kinda forgot about it--it broke some stuff, and most of my connected devices could run their own adblocker.
Only in the past year did I finally buy a "Smart" TV and leverage its existing GoogleTV apps, because I got tired of trying to maintain my aging Kodi Box. I should probably setup PiHole anew and point my Smart TV's DNS at it...
I'm curious when I see quotes like this - are people exposing their home network to the internet? Or running a pi-hole in the cloud? VPN'ing into the home network? Or what?
I have run a pi-hole in the traditional sense (a raspberry pi with pi-hole software on my home network with my home router DNS pointing at it). But this doesn't prevent me from seeing ads when I'm out and about on 5G or public wifi or work wifi or whatever.
As an aside I stopped running pi-holes at home for reliability reasons. Lots of failed SD cards, locked up raspberry pis etc became more aggravation than it was worth. It's a neat system - when it's working.
A lot of nerds also have some form of private overlay network with default DNS to adguard or pihole or similar, again, making for identical adblock experience on all platforms.
On my phone I do both: I use AdGuard DNS to block ads system-wide, and Vivaldi's built-in ad blocker to block those ads that still slip through.
Sending an e-mail is not the same thing, it's like Youtube removing the unlike button count and instead sending the info only to the creator.
This doesn't apply to your blog, but I've seen low quality or misleading content without a possibility to comment. Even worse: scams that include a fake comment section.
Besides the general issue with the assumption, what prevents you from using a non-distracting style instead?
Pfft. Half of the fun on the Internet is arguing with people about what other people said. I like to link to this blog post with over 500 replies about a constructivist who doesn't believe in the well-definedness of real numbers and shows up in the comments to respond to people: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-th...
I really do not believe that blog would be better by not having comments enabled.
I propose to you that you should be in favor of a diverse internet, that is blogs that have comments sections, blogs that have likes, blogs that have neither, and blogs that do something else. That is probably the most enriching outcome.
I'll have to dive in sometime. This interests me in a way that Mastodon and BlueSky do not.
TBH, I have considered writing a version (this isn't my work at all, yet) that does submit the blathering server-side so it looks like there is a useful round trip, but:
* I have more important projects awaiting the much fabled arrival of Free Time!
* While it could potentially keep an idiot “happy” longer, I'd have to mess around with some sort of login system to give the right people the right comments back, it couldn't rely on a just session ID as that would be as volatile as the comments in local storage.
* Taking in the data gives the possibility of DoS by extra routes.
* Giving back the data gives the possibility of the comments being abused as a Heath-Robinson-esk storage device!
I'm trying Mastodon comments on my own blog, that I'm not posting here because it isn't really ready, from my own Mastodon account. I'd never even consider public comments anymore, it just seems like inviting trouble.
HN doesn't have an algorithm, per se.
There are voting mechanics, and some sites gain or lose a penalty based on content or type (most generic news sites, for example, are slightly penalised). There are keyword / topic penalties too for issues that are dominating the hivemind for a period.
But mostly what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects, along with early-action advantage:
- Votes / article tend to follow a power-law curve, where the frequency of high votes is inversely related to the vote. This typically shows as a linear relation when the log of both values is taken (log(frequency) vs. log(votes)). There are 30 front-page slots on HN, about 11,000 opportunities per year (at day's end, more if you count intra-day appearances), vs. about 400,000 submissions (see: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>). Most submissions won't make the grade, often through no fault of their own. I've looked into this in some detail, including looking at votes/comments by story position (there's a sharp decrease here as well).
- A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect on the trajectory of a given story. Low-quality comments are particularly deleterious, and are hunted aggressively by mods for this reason.
- Stories often do far better on a subsequent submission. Part of this is probably randomness, part also a familiarity effect among those reviewing the "New" queue. If at first you don't succeed ... try again, a few times, at least.
- Stories can get selected (or nominated for) the Second Chance or Invited pools. These increase odds of landing higher on the front page, and are used fairly frequently. See "pool" <https://news.ycombinator.com/pool> and "invited" <https://news.ycombinator.com/invited> under "lists".
> A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect
This is exactly the problem.
> what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects
I would challenge that point. Power law comes from some feedback loop, which is partially from network effects but it can be massively amplified by the system, which is exactly what HN does. Not only it bakes the power law directly into the score eqaution, but it also shows the list sorted by score by default, which creates a positive feedback loop on votes.
Actually I'm a bit perplexed that it works this well, HN algorithm was one of the first that I implemented on our site and it was quite terrible even after a lot of tuning. I feel like it must be tuned for some volume of posts and people, otherwise it doesn't make much sense to me.
<https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-myth-of-the-algorithm...>
To the extent that HN does utilise specific procedural mechanisms to adjust the priority of content, it's virtually always away from the typical patterns of algorithmic amplification: less emotion, less outrage, fewer hot takes, less nationalism and relgious flamewars, and specifically toward "intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>.
It would be possible, yes, though incredibly disingenuous, to argue that what HN is doing is itself amplification. Yes, any curation is an amplification of some content over other, but in a world where "algorithmic content" means clickbait, brain-crack, and stickyness, HN is quite clearly aiming for something else.
Another facile objection is that HN fails to achieve its stated goals. Well, yes, it does, and the mods freely admit this (see, e.g.: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20188101>). Why does HN fall short? Because the problem is hard (see, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16163743>).
If power-law dynamics were purely the result of manipulative algorithmic amplification, we'd see them only in online media subject to such amplification. And that's simply not the case. Power laws are fundamental to not only all of human communications and interactions (word and letter frequencies, for example, neither of which suggest a strong influence by algorithmic amplification), but to all manner of natural phenomena, including those entirely outside the realm of biological activity (e.g., frequency/magnitude plots of earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid impacts, and stellar novae).
And in the realm of interpersonal online communications, HN's goals and interventions (mods, voting, and some programmed mechanisms) are desperately trying to swim upstream. As someone whose online tenure pre-dates the Web and extends to pre-Eternal September Usenet, HN has done remarkably well, and outlived many of its antecedents' and competitors' useful or entire lives (Usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Google+, et cetera). Trust me, I'd love to see it do better (a view often voiced by mods as well). But in an ordinal ranking with what actually exists it's an exemplar.
This isn't a nitpick, it's a core and central point with (literally) universal applicability.
We've known that advertising is "filling the world with bile and garbage" for decades.
`pseudo
main(
return True
)`
I did try to implement partial-clone but failed
Let's be honest, for a personal blog, >1k comments is an overestimate.
It is painful for writing, but reading comments is quite fast and 99% is about loading.
Maybe, maybe not. Before 2024, my blog got <10k views/y. Then in 2024 it got close to 1 million (this year it will likely be 100k). Very hard to predict traffic thanks to hn and stuff!
Allowing force-push is considered an antipattern for Git, and generally best avoided. It's a safeguard against lost history and prevents data loss.
That aside, the comments are the history. Git is the wrong tool for the job. Why would you choose a generic version-control system designed for source code diffs & merges for the specialised task of chronologically-ordered comments? A database such as PostgreSQL is a far superior choice in just about every possible way. I admire your ingenuity here to make something out of what's available, but I respectfully disagree with this being a good way to capture user-generated content when there are better alternatives.
you mean other files will bloat the repo and slow down the performance? Yes it's a very valid concern, but this system targets personal blogs, which I assume had very few comment traffic.
> Git is the wrong tool for the job ..... A database ... is a far superior choice in just about every possible way
the same argument applies to Wordpress.
But most tech people are choosing static generated blogs anyway, and with git too. File system is the database.
And there are good reasons for that.
I still wouldn't put them into Git along with the rest of the site, that's a definitely no-no. A separate Git? Also no for me. Filesystem does seem viable on reflection, and I feel inspired to explore this now.
Agree! I regret letting my Vizio TV stay online for as long as I did.
At first it was fine, and I did get a UI refresh a couple years back that was OK.
But then some update caused it to start ripping control away from whatever my last HDMI input was so it could show me ads (which fails). Even though it's perma-offline now, it still messes with my inputs sometimes.
There are easy ways to fix that at the router level, but DNS-over-HTTPS clowns ruined this.
I don't like DoH due to the central gatekeepers its current implementation in browsers encourages but I don't think it really changes anything here.
Yes! This is easy to do on OpenBSD as well, though it's called "redirect" instead of "DNAT":
pass in quick on $int_if inet proto udp to any port 53 rdr-to $dns_server port 53
pass in quick on $int_if inet proto tcp to any port 53 rdr-to $dns_server port 53Overall, it's just easier not to connect "smart" devices to the Internet at all. I prefer to use a Linux HTPC instead of a smart TV for example. It is completely under my control and I am not restricted to apps approved by Apple or Google, asked to log into anything or to accept ever-changing terms and conditions.
I mean, you are. You are adding friction to the process. If someone wants to talk about a post of yours they have find some forum where it would be relevant and link to it. I don't know what it looks like on your end. Maybe adding the ability to comment would be more effort than you think is worthwhile, but if it was as simple as a checkbox, you would still leave it turned off, am I wrong?
>I personally find internet arguments to be a waste of time most of the time
Of course it's a waste of time. So is blogging, as well as many other activities humans engage in.
>I propose to you that you should be in favor of a diverse internet
I'm naturally going to be for an Internet that accommodates the things I want to do, against one that doesn't (when it could), and indifferent about one that accommodates things I'm not interested in. I don't know what your blog is, so I don't want to comment on it, so I'm indifferent whether it gives readers the ability to comment, so I don't particularly care to try to convince you do anything.
But, I have felt that tiny bit of frustration when I read or watched something and scrolled down to see what people said about it and saw there was no comment section, either by design or omission. Sometimes that has been enough to disengage me from the thing in question.
HN of course have all of these problems, just look at what we're doing now. It's in some ways better and some ways worse than others.
It's trendy these days to blame the algorithm or social media companies, but these problems are way more fundamental. Thinking that this platform and even you yourself is somehow immune to this is delusional.
> an end-goal of increasing time-on-site, engagement, addiction, outrage, and similar measures
Yea, again, this is naive oversimplification that's just been popular recently, but those are not endgoals and often go against platform goals. Outraged users don't click ads and increase revenue, they cause problems, drive other people away from the platform, same is true for the other issues.
As somebody who's been working on a social media platform for 7 years, I just can't hear this stuff anymore. Those problems exist, they are hard and much deeper and more difficult to solve than most people think.
For example:
- gambling, e.g. slot machines, sports betting
- healing crystals
- palm readings
- carnival games
Perhaps the right distinction is whether something is legally a fraud or not. But I kind of agree that most ads are scams and also that ad networks don't have the ability to separate legal scams from fraud. So I just block them all.
what about iPhones? They're ubiquitous enough that Apple probably doesn't need ads to let people know they exist, yet every at launch ads for them are plastered everywhere. Same with soft drinks and cars, just to name a few. Before you say "iPhone sucks", the same can be said for basically all other phone OEMs, and if your theory allows categorizing an entire industry as crap, your theory is basically unfalsifiable.
Or maybe, just maybe, the entire industry is crap and so many people are complicit such that it becomes a self-sustaining problem.
Another metric comes to my mind: if a newcomer has money to spend on ads, then it's a stable firm.
I'm sure there are more.
Henry hoovers are ubiquitous in the professional market in the UK and well regarded for durability, performance and the cute face all their cleaners have. Essentially anyone in the UK will have used, or seen one be used
Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.
Also, obligatory "lucky 10k" xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
How would that make the world better?
there is in the UK. And likely in most other jurisdictions too. But it's about penalizing the advertisers rather than the platform. Which clearly neither works at scale nor across borders.
This definitely feels like a better use case for an "online safety act" -- but instead we got censorship laws....
If it wasn't a threat, they wouldn't police it so hard.
https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/consumer-alerts/fraud-alert-nation...
When you heard the vocal equivalent of large type text every real person knew that it was time to get grandma away from the TV but... the people at the TV network didn't, law enforcement didn't, your congressman didn't, anybody in a position of power didn't. And no wonder people feel cynical, hate the media, distrust the cops, distrust politicians, feel "the game is rigged", etc.
In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424888
(US infocoms, and Google in particular, aren't reputable companies any more. Ban them all.)
The situation’s been like this for a few years now.
The cost of enforcement would break every government's budget. The cost asymmetry is the problem.
For the bulk of legit advertisers, this won't affect the bottom line of a given campaign and will keep out the scammers, etc. Leading to a much higher quality ecosystem. It would also give Google the potential for a higher percentage share of profits in the system. It would also likely reduce the CPM pricing though, possibly to a larger extent than profits from the validation system itself.
But it would be a much healthier overall system.
While it has gotten around the "logical fallacy community", for lack of a better term, in the last few years, it could still stand to be known by more people. It's become very popular. I think there are many who have subconsciously picked it up as just how things are done.
But I don't care* about that, I care that they're visually obnoxious and sometimes slow.
* Well, usually. Way back when, there used to be occasional news about browser sandbox escapes.
Are Meta and TikTok better at filtering scammy ads out? Maybe their ML recommendation systems realize I’d never click on such an ad and the other platforms can’t figure that out.
As if people read only reuptable sites ...
Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly illegal or scam ads I’ve seen on YouTube. but still, 3 big tech companies that could have definitely stopped this is they really wanted to.
What did your grandmother need Chrome for? You couldn't find the 5m it would take to set her up with Firefox?
Now, we're getting diaper commercials all over youtube. I assume we're flagged in some database as likely having a new child, but you can't ever know for sure.
and if you've ever listened to one of Robert's (CZM executive producer and host of some of their flagships) other podcasts you might understand why companies don't want him doing ad reads.
I’m not even against pre-recorded spots by whoever the sponsor is if that’s his deal though the conversion rate on those are not as good. It’s just the completely random ads that the podcaster(s) don’t even know are playing on their show. The entire reason advertising on podcasting was more effective in the 2010s and early 2020s was because there was a little more trust with their listeners, there’s a relationship at play even if it’s parasocial. If they were actively reading on air, I assumed that they vetted the company and it at least passed the smell test (though plenty sure didn’t, I would say the bar was a little higher than other media formats).
Yes, but those are dynamic too: if you go back and download old episodes, for example, you'll get the current run of ads.
https://podcastindex.org/apps podcasting 2.0 app index.
The biggest giveaway is when the ads are dropped in the middle of someone talking. Pretty much any hits that are manually added are led into by the hosts if it’s mid-show.
That said, I run old fashioned forums and some older threads get revived there from time to time with new insights. Others get flagged up by copyright holders under DMCA takedown threats or bumped by spambots though.
Remember Shoutboxes? :)
This forum doesn't exist to get you to comment on news stories; it exists to attract tech people to YC.
If you're defining "ads" to be a "problem", then it turns the statement into a meaningless tautology. Only crappy brand use ads, because brands that use ads are crappy.
Hey, you're starting to get it, but not quite.
Only crappy brands use ads, because ads pollute my very valuable time, my very valuable window of vision, my very valuable hearing, and my very valuable sanity in trying to stay safe against malware hiding in advertisements. That's on top of wasting my valuable money convincing me to buy things that I don't want to buy.
If a brand really wants me to use their product, then make a great product and show off its features in demos, at conferences, and it will eventually get to me by word of mouth. One friend showing me how a product has improved their life is worth at least five-figure digit counts of ads shown to me, if not six-figure counts.
If she had had more time, I could see Khan going after fake ads as well. There's nothing to me that suggests that she was deliberately ignoring fraudulent ads when she was extremely pro-consumer in nearly every other policy.
For example on retro computing boards it makes me so happy when someone bumps a 5 year old thread to share new details, benchmarks, etc. about some card or motherboard where the ancient thread is first thing that appears in search results.
It's not like the client app is inserting them.
I mean, I guess I can imagine an exceptionally-scummy podcast app, but that's not what we're talking about here.
These ads are not just not baked into the audio file, they are legitimately a mystery to the people running the show sometimes. And I think that that’s kind of unconscionable tbh. Podcasts (especially early on) owe a lot of their success to the feeling of “authenticity,” they feel more personal and less “corporate” generally. Whether that’s reality or not we can of course debate, but it’s how audiences perceived them. The reason on air reads have been generally successful for podcasts is because of the trust between the podcast and the audience that has been built over time. This runs directly counter to it.
at a certain point, one has to ask themselves if whatever media they're ingesting is worth the scum.
It's just an mp3 file!
edit: I should point out that i pitched, to Apple, the ability to dynamically insert ads sometime around ipod 5th gen, 2005-2006, but not for podcasts, but for downloadable videos, like "last night's TV show". I'm sorry i did this. I don't mean i had the idea and said "hey this is an idea", i had the entire infrastructure documented, it was drop in and go. Whoops.
DAI is a thing and my initial point several comments ago was that too many podcasts implement it, let advertisers drop their stuff in (not their own read), and never check what’s actually being run on their show. That’s all my point was about.
You can look up your Google ad profile and see if "pregnant" is one of your account's attributes. Facebook has a similar page somewhere.